The Way of Exchange: Stance, Release, Next Stance

The essay behind this series is about the sword. This last part is about exchange, the work the name moromoro was given to. It is our own reading, and it rests on a rhythm we draw from the teaching of 有構無構:

構: the stance

A swap begins with a position. To trade one token for another, a route must actually stand somewhere: in a particular pool, on a particular DEX, at a particular fee tier. There is no trading in the abstract. Like the swordsman who learns 上段, 中段, 下段 and the two side stances before anything else, a router has to know its venues in detail: how each pool prices, how deep it is, what it costs to pass through.

The five stances can be read as the many venues. The 五輪書 is clear that the sword’s position is not chosen from a diagram; it answers to 敵の縁, 所, and けいき. A route’s position answers to the same three things, in a different vocabulary:

• 縁, relationship: how this trade relates to the liquidity that exists, its size against the depth of each pool, the pairs that connect one token to another.
• 所, place: where the liquidity actually sits, on which chain, which DEX, which pool.
• けいき, the condition of the moment: the price and timing now, which will not be the price and timing a minute from now.

A stance, then, is a position taken because the moment calls for it. It is real, and it is temporary.

捨てる: release

The difficulty is not taking a position. It is letting it go.

Traders know the feeling of 居付く (itsuku), the mind that has become fixed: a favorite DEX, a pool that worked last week, a route chosen out of habit. Nothing is wrong with the venue. The problem is that the mind has given permanence to something that should only be temporary. When the liquidity moves, the price shifts, or the moment passes, the fixed mind is still standing where it stood.

Routers can become fixed in the same way. A router that always sends a pair through the same venue has a stance, and the stance has it. It must first “leave” its position before it can consider another, and often it never does.

moromoro’s instruction to the swordsman applies here almost word for word:

For a router, the cut is the exchange itself: the best outcome available for this trade, now. The venue is only the stance through which it happens. To release (捨てる) is not to reject a venue or to judge it bad. It is to stop clinging to it once the reason for standing there has gone.

次の構: the next stance

Release does not leave nothing behind. The route does not dissolve; it re-forms around the new reality: another pool, another DEX, another chain, or a split across several at once, each part standing where it is best placed.

This is what the 五輪書 describes when 上段 descends into 中段 and 中段 rises into 上段. The five stances are not five isolated boxes but points along a continuous field of movement. In the same way, the many venues are not separate worlds a trade must choose between once and for all. They are one field of liquidity, and a route is the shape that field takes for a moment.

There is always a route. There should be no attachment to it.

The many and various

Here the two meanings of the name meet. もろもろ is “the many and various”: every chain, every DEX, every pool, every source of liquidity. moromoro is also the practitioner who knows the five stances so well that none of them needs to be preferred. A DEX aggregator, as we understand it, is both at once. It gathers the many venues, and it is fixed in none of them.

The knowledge comes first. The essay warns that emptiness which comes from not knowing is only 迷い (mayoi), confusion. A router that ignores venues it does not understand is not free of attachment; it is merely lost. Non-attachment is earned by knowing each venue well: how it prices, where its liquidity sits, when it is the right place to stand.

So the rhythm repeats with every trade, and never quite the same way twice:

Form remains. A route is always something definite: these pools, these proportions, this transaction. But the form does not become a prison. That is the stance of great emptiness as we would like moromoro to hold it: not a router without positions, but one whose possibilities have not been closed by any single one.